“Whoa! Hey, what’s your name?” this huge Samoan-looking guy asked.
“I’m Dave Gibbons. I’m half-Korean and half-American. I know I look a hundred percent Korean, but yeah—I’m not adopted.” I always felt a need to be very specific about my racial identity. My emphasis was always on “American.” I wanted them to know that I was one of them.
“Well, bro, you should try out for the Mesa High School football team and play with us. You’re good.”
This was the starting tackle of the JV (junior varsity) football team telling me this. It was one of the first times I felt such affirmation from a peer who would be considered “cool.” It was a good feeling. And Mesa High was one of the large public high schools renowned for their football and wrestling programs.
It was the start of the summer after my parents’ divorce. I needed a diversion from all the pain. In that moment, I realized I could play high school football—the all-American ticket to popularity and acceptance in the high school ecosystem. I followed the Samoan guy’s advice and did exactly that. I left City Academy and returned to the public school. With my father now gone, he was powerless to keep me at a Christian school. I wanted to forget God, along with anything my father said was good for me, like the church and the Christian school. I wanted no part of it. It was a direct way of disrespecting my father and his desire for me to be a good Christian young man.
After feeling the invisibility that comes with divorce, added to the invisibility of being a legal “alien” in America, I was desperately looking for some tribe to belong to. A place to be seen and known. Football became that home. It was good for me because it was a legal way to physically release my frustrations. Football became a place to vent my adolescent emotional traumas. Violence was accepted on the field, and even applauded. I could hit people without consequences. It was an acceptable place to deal with my emotional wounds, and perhaps prove to my father that I could make it without him by becoming an elite athlete. Without his help, I could find societal acceptance and respect. Being aggressive on the field also made me popular on campus. The coaches that summer treated me like I was this new football prodigy. I was an exciting new starting prospect who had come out of nowhere from some private school nearby.
This would have been exciting for anybody, but this was monumental for a kid who had felt invisible. Because of my determined attitude and ability to play hard, the coaches experimented with putting me in multiple positions. I hadn’t played tackle football or any organized sport in middle school. This newfound attention was flattering, but challenging as well. I tried the best I could, but there was a litany of football jargon and plays to learn for someone new to the sport at one of the top high school programs in the state. In the end, I told the coaches I just wanted to keep things simple. I could block on offense or tackle on defense. I wanted them to put me in a position that wouldn’t require the level of understanding necessary for a quarterback or another high-skill player. I wanted to focus on something I knew I could do well and not have to think too much on the field. I did not want to risk failing and lose this feeling of being accepted. That risk was too great. I knew if I could play one of the less complex positions, I was a lock to be on the team.
Just turn me loose.
Dad had instilled into me a confidence that I could do anything if I tried, and he taught me this through our hours of practicing throwing baseballs or footballs at one another in the front yard. I’d say, “I can’t do this, Dad.” He’d say, “Can’t never do nothing.” A triple negative. A double negative was improper in English. Dad, being a voracious reader, was a master of the English language. He had a rich vocabulary, which made this triple negative more memorable: “Can’t never do nothing.”
During the practices, I had fun unleashing who I was—a wild, out-of-touch, misfit Asian kid who had a real chip on his shoulder. I would breathe erratically, like a bull ready to gore my opponents, huffing and puffing on the line like I couldn’t wait to hit you. I wanted to be unpredictable and overly intense! Our coaches told us if you hit a player three times in a row as hard as you can, they would give up. They were right. I did this to players much heftier than me and they would succumb. I’m sure they hadn’t met an Asian guy like me before. I was the opposite of the stereotype of a weak, deferential Asian. With my success in football, my confidence grew.
At the time, our team had a star running back who would later become an NFL pro football player. He was fast and knew how to run. As an offensive lineman who blocked for him, I loved seeing him jet up the field after we opened a hole for him. Often, we would make not only one block, but sometimes two on a play. One time, we played a team that had this offensive tackle whom I had to go up against, a large mass of muscles who said he was sixteen but looked like he was twenty-five. He was at least one foot taller and wider than me and probably weighed twice my body weight, even though I was big for my size, having beefed up on beer and steak. During one play, I fired off the line like I’d been taught. I would go lower than the other player to get leverage. But this time, even though I’d gone lower, it was like running into a concrete wall. I bounced off this mound of muscles and could only look up at him from the ground while he ran past me like a bull. That didn’t stop me from bouncing up and going back for more.
The drive to be accepted by the other athletes—and, of course, the girls—because of my football skills was a great motivation for me.
I played so well because I wasn’t afraid of hurting myself. I didn’t care about my body. Nothing I felt on the field was as painful as what it was like to be in my own home, wondering where my mom was, or hearing her crying at night when she finally made it back from the bar. My worst fears had already happened when my family blew up.
Besides, I liked playing a sport in which your ethnicity and physical characteristics had little to do with your acceptance on the team. I loved that when we put on our helmets and pads, we all looked alike. The difference would not be our eyes or accents, but how we played the game.
Sports helped me gain confidence, but still the bullying didn’t stop. After a challenging practice, we were taking off all our sweat-drenched equipment and throwing it in these large rolling laundry containers. Hanging up our pads in our locker or throwing the smaller pads into a bin. Then making our way to the group shower area, where rows of multiple metal shower heads were neatly and strategically placed on one pole. One by one we entered into the showers, joking around while we got ourselves cleaned up.
I was soaping up when I felt this warm stream of liquid hitting my leg. The starting running back, the one who would later play in the NFL, was urinating on my leg. When I noticed it and looked at him, he just started laughing. The sad thing was that he was Asian, too, of Tongan and Polynesian descent. I came to learn a brutal truth. Just because you look alike doesn’t mean you experience the same pain. Sometimes that makes you more inclined to bully, simply to prove you’re not like that other guy. The slur of being an “Uncle Tom” became real to me.
Even as his urine ran down my leg, I laughed with the guy, yet I walked out of the locker room feeling humiliated. And later, disgusted with myself that I didn’t fight back again. I know the incident might have been just another random immature teenage jock thing, but I had thought my teammates would be different. Football would provide opportunities to earn respect, where my racial identity wouldn’t matter, or so I’d thought.
I had trusted football to make me someone who deserved respect. My mantra had been: Outwork people. Hustle will make up for skill. If I failed in football or in life, it wouldn’t be because of effort. This was the mantra I owned. I learned one can have a high tolerance for pain. Some call it a learned helplessness, meaning that if you’re confronted with a constant state of pain, abuse, or trauma, you get used to it, so much so that when you can avert it, you still choose not to run away from the hurt, because you’ve gotten so used to it feeling inescapable. I was learning to live with pain but not be overcome by it.
It was slowly becoming clear that the football community wasn’t going to be family for me. I was still lost. And alone.
CHAPTER TEN Rocky Mountain High
Hey, Gibbons. I hear you like playing racquetball.”
The gruff voice took me by surprise. I had just arrived home and pulled my motorcycle into the garage. The short and stocky forty-year-old standing on our driveway was our neighbor from four houses down. Dave Bunt and his family had recently moved to our neighborhood, and he had started a position as the new youth pastor at my old church. He and his wife, Stephanie, had a large family, and they were regularly hosting teenagers or kids who had been struggling. Their house resembled Grand Central Station for wayward kids. They were a large family but they still took in other kids who were from broken homes.
He had heard about me from others at the church who said, “Don’t waste your time on Dave Gibbons. He’s too far gone.” I was one of those “worldly” kids whom parents didn’t want their children to hang around.
Pastor Bunt heard this as a challenge. It was a confirmation that he needed to spend time with me.
“Want to play some racquetball sometime?” he asked me with a large bright smile. “We can go for a Slurpee at 7-Eleven afterwards.”
The racquetball I could pass on, but the Slurpee was hard to say no to. “Sure! Let’s do it.” I always liked a good challenge, so why not? It’d be fun to beat the old religious guy. Besides, he was a neighbor. Perhaps that wasn’t coincidental. Pastor Dave would later play a key role in my life that would mature and direct me in ways I didn’t know I needed.
As Bunt walked back down the sidewalk to his house, I watched his swagger. He had greased-back black hair like Elvis and large muscular arms. He was a tradesman. A burly, blue-collar mechanic who knew how to work and put in long hours. He had a small round beer gut, too. Not sure, though, it was from beer, since he was a fundamentalist Christian pastor. When I first met him, I wasn’t impressed. Initially, he came across as cocky, even a bit arrogant. I had been to Pastor Bunt’s youth meetings a couple of times, and while he was a good speaker and challenged us to learn to communicate, his teaching manner felt a bit too authoritarian. He’d shout at inattentive young people to “Zip the lip!” He’d call you out if you were sleeping while he was speaking. He carried my dad’s authority, yet it felt more raw, crass, and direct. Dad could communicate things with a look and no words; Bunt would make sure to use the force of his voice with his stern looks. It was a Don’t test me because you don’t want to know what I’ll do to you sort of look.
On this day, though, something was different. The firm and demanding demeanor was gone. In fact, there was a certain humility when he asked if I wanted to play racquetball with him. After Mom’s episode in the driveway, Pastor Simpson must have told Pastor Bunt to start spending time with me, because he started popping over to our house more frequently. Originally, I didn’t want to hang with him. He didn’t seem cool at all with his greased hair. I mean, he was a pastor. I was having too much fun playing football, making new friends. I was done with God stuff for now. I was experimenting with the things City Academy and City Church forbade us to do. But after he discovered that my brother, Doug, and I enjoyed playing competitive racquetball, the youth pastor figured out a way to connect to me.
Over the next few months, he’d come over and ask me to play racquetball again every so often. After repeatedly beating him silly, I started to kind of like him. He was similar to my dad in how he could take getting hit with the balls and keep on going. He constantly got hit on the butt or the back with racquetballs I was zinging toward the front wall. The rubber balls left perfectly round bruises in multiple spots on his body. There was certainly some type of foolish delight in seeing him get hit by my ball. But he kept on playing, donning these large round bruises on his back. Again, like my dad.
One of those nights, after he lost multiple games, I asked him a question. Bunt later told me it was a question no one had ever asked him before and never asked him since. With our rackets in his car trunk and our giant Slurpees in our hands, we sat on the curb, our T-shirts drenched and perspiration dripping from our heads. I still wasn’t quite used to the Arizona heat, even at night. It was close to midnight as we enjoyed our frozen drinks and heard the occasional car rolling by in the distance.
Out of nowhere came a question that got unearthed from deep inside my soul.
“How does a person fall out of love?”
My parents’ separation still confounded me. Instead of quickly giving me a pat answer or even expressing his own curiosity, Pastor Bunt simply gave me an earnest look, one that seemed to say, That’s a really good question, kid.
For several moments, we sat in silence.
“Let’s go home,” he finally said.
He gave the right answer. Silence.
That summer, right around the time I had started tasting some measure of peer acceptance from playing football, Bunt invited me to a Christian youth camp in Telluride, Colorado. Regardless of what the organizers had in mind, I saw this camp as a time to escape from our family troubles, have fun with friends, and par-tay. Though at the last moment we wisely didn’t bring alcohol, we were still ready to make a nuisance of ourselves.
The truth was I still struggled to fit in, even with the new set of guys around me. Many of my football teammates had known each other and played together since they were very young. Every day I constantly compared myself to others who were more skilled socially, academically, and athletically. I had found a new identity to cling to, but in reality I still felt like I didn’t belong, like I was still a misfit. I could be like them but my physical appearance would always make me stand out, especially in America at this time.
There were lots of misfits heading to camp, kids from my old school and church. Moments after getting on the bus, I saw the biggest one.
